Experimental demonstration of beaconless beam displacement tracking for an orbital angular momentum multiplexed free-space optical link

Opt Lett. 2018 May 15;43(10):2392-2395. doi: 10.1364/OL.43.002392.

Abstract

In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate beaconless beam displacement tracking for free-space optical communication link multiplexing multiple orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, where the data-carrying OAM beams are used for position detection. 400 Gbit/s data transmission is demonstrated under emulated lateral displacement of up to ±10 mm with power penalties of less than 3 dB for all channels. Channel crosstalk is reduced by the beam tracking system to below -18 dB. Moreover, we investigate using a Gaussian beacon for beam displacement tracking, and achieve similar channel crosstalk and power penalties, compared with using the beaconless beam tracking.